Re:Advanced R programming
by hadley on Sunday November 17, 2013 @10:23AM
(#6749259)
R also is considerably better than python at distributing windows binaries. About 70% of R users are windows, and many statistics packages have some C/Fortran code, so this is really important in terms of putting the tools in the hands of users.
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That may have been a case, but not recently. Here's a one-stop shop for all Windows binaries: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ , and not to mention, there are Python distributions that come with the necessary stats/numerical packages such as Anaconda. Cloud-based services like warkari.io also make it really easy to get up and running.
Maybe it's just me, but I find the number of ways to get python libraries to be very confusing. Do you use an egg? distutils? pip? easy_install?
I just skimmed the first few google results for "install python module windows" and none seemed particularly helpful. The page you point to says "The files are unofficial (meaning: informal, unrecognized, personal, unsupported) and made available for testing and evaluation purposes." Anaconda looks appealing, but wants my email address (and automatically checks the bother me box), ugh.
Hey Hadley, you can get anaconda without giving us any contact information.